Deep Sea on Big Screen

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: September 9, 2003

The new IMAX movie ''Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,'' which has its world premiere today in Los Angeles at the California Science Center, illuminates the dark world of the vents as never before, giving its creatures, hot springs and towering chimneys a remarkable new venue.

By all accounts, the film's making was a scientific labor of love involving at least $8 million, 10 years of work, 20 submersible dives and no little encouragement from a Hollywood mogul (James Cameron), a large university (Rutgers) and the federal government (the National Science Foundation).

The movie shows the usual mobs of crabs, blind shrimp and tube worms -- white-stalked, red-plumed -- flourishing near volcanic fluids hot enough to melt tin and lead. But it goes further by creating a narrative that zooms in on one of the vents' most intriguing riddles, Paleodictyon nodosum, a creature that flourished 55 million years ago and is known only by fossils of its peculiar arrays of hexagonal tunnels.

The movie follows a trail of scientific clues suggesting that the creature, presumably extinct, in fact continues to thrive in old volcanic regions of the seabed, and describes the long hunt for a specimen. So far, the scientists in their submersible dives have discovered fresh hexagonal tunnels but no living fossils.

Production of the movie, described as the largest effort ever undertaken to film the vent creatures and habitats, took three years and more than 20 dives in the Atlantic and Pacific by the deep-sea submersible Alvin, run by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.

In a first for a university, Rutgers joined with the Stephen Low Company to produce the IMAX film. Directed by Stephen Low, the movie is to open Nov. 8 in New York at the American Museum of Natural History. Other cities showing the film this fall include Seattle (Pacific Science Center), Jersey City (Liberty Science Center), Syracuse (Museum of Science & Technology) and Boston (New England Aquarium).

Photo: A riddle of the vents: evidence that a creature presumed to be extinct still may thrive in old volcanic regions of the seabed. (Photo by The Stephen Low Company)